Gary Alan Fine

Gary Alan Fine is the John Evans Professor of Sociology at Northwestern University, a chair he has held since 2004. Before joining the faculty of Northwestern in 1997, he served as professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota (1976-90) and the University of Georgia (1990-97).

Mr. Fine has authored over two hundred articles in such important publications as American Sociological Review, American Journal of Sociology, Journal of American Folklore, and American Ethnologist and edited eight volumes, including A Second Chicago School?: The Development of a Postwar American Sociology (U. of Chicago Press, 1995). His research interests are wide ranging, as is evident from the topics of his fourteen monograph publications, such as Authors of the Storm: Meteorology and the Production of the Future (U. of Chicago Press, 2007), which won the 2008 Cooley Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction; (with Ralph L. Rosnow) Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay (Elsevier, 1976; Japanese translation, 1982); With the Boys: Little League Baseball and Preadolescent Culture (U. of Chicago, 1987), which received the American Folklore Society’s Opie Award in 1988; Kitchens: The Culture of Restaurant Work (U of California Press, 1996; Japanese translation, 2000); and Manufacturing Tales: Sex and Money in Contemporary Legends (U. of Tennessee Press, 1992), which was nominated for both the Chicago Folklore Prize and the John Hope Franklin Publication Prize.

In addition to his Guggenheim Fellowship, he has received fellowships from the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences, in Palo Alto (1994-95), the Collegium for the Advanced Study of the Social Sciences, in Uppsala, Sweden (2003), the Russell Sage Foundation (2005-06), and the Rockefeller Study Center, in Bellagio, Italy (2008), as well as grants from the NSF and the Spencer Foundation.

He has also served as President of the Society for the Study of Social Problems and as Editor of Social Psychology Quarterly. The Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction honored him with its George Herbert Mead Award for Lifetime Contributions in 2003.